5 non-SEO ways to increase your search rankings

Search Engine Optimisation involves making sure all your main content is coming together in the right way to form a strong presence of your website within search engines for your targeted keywords. However, beyond these best practices, there are a number of great ideas and services to help support the SEO process and get your website ranked for your revlevant keywords.

1. Enhance Web Site Usability

As Jakob Nielsen puts it, "site design must be aimed with simplicity above all else, with as few distractions as possible and with very clear information architecture and matching navigation tools." In short, if a website is not usable for your visitors / potential customers, then search engines will have a difficult time finding the most relevant content, too.

Melon's website audit will help rate the usability and structure of your website to ensure your website is not only usable, but also easily accessible for both users of your target market and search engines, increasing the potential for anchor text-rich internal linking.

2. Work with a Marketing Team

About half of all SEO projects fail in delivering because they never worked together with any other channels. If your brand message is not communicated through offline or other online channels (such as PPC, e-marketing, cross-promotions) then it is likely that you and your brand will appear in the search, but the click-through-rate to your site will drop.

Combining efforts with a marketing team will give your website a real push towards your goal of attaining brand and search engine visibility.

3. Incorporate Traditional PR Efforts into the SEO Plan

Press releases should be optimized to help your Web site perform better within search results. Involving both marketing and SEO to go through content, structuring text links and call to actions will ensure more coverage towards your website and brand, and is a great way to improve your search engine ranks.

4. Monitoring and Making the Most of Communities

Every industry has an online community of some size. Some industries -- such as travel or games in particular -- have literally thousands of forums and blogs talking about deals and experiences.

Melon's SEO team works close with the marketing team to make use of these areas and help you become an active participant to gain not only attraction to your brand and offerings, but also gain ranks through more inbound links - and all that without spamming websites and appearing invasive.

More importantly, there is lots of user-generated content about products and services in these communities, providing both invaluable feedback for refinement of current offerings and services, as well as an excellent base for future online and offline marketing efforts.

5. Keep Content Fresh by Updating it Regularly

Sometimes, updating content is on a regular basis can be difficult. For example, a company that sells a certain type of service may have no reason to update its content as the service does not change.

However, "stale" content leads to a reduction in return visits to your website - why would a user want to come back to just read the same content month after month whereas your competitors add more information a lot more regularly?

Improving and updating your content can help you to gain rankings for terms that will drive traffic, continuously adding new and appealing content to your site will build rankings and help keep them there.

Connecting your online and offline efforts are vital to the success of your website, and running your marketing efforts through many channels will aid in attaining this goal. Speak to us today to discuss how we can make this happen!